He woke up, got out of bed and moved his bowels. If I could find a daily narrative as gripping as that, I swear I would post daily as opposed to once in a few days.
I am reading the fourth installment of George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. It is one of the best fantasy epics ever written, IMHO, on par with the golden standard of them all, The Lord of the Rings. One of the characters conducts a search of old books in a library and comes across chronicles depicting fine deeds of a high lord. The chronicles exhaustively follow the lord through every minute of his awakened hours. Every day, therefore, starts with the somewhat repetitive but inescapable note of the lord moving his bowels. I got to thinking that chronicles of that kind could be rather illuminating… but ultimately decided to spare my audience.
The weekend was rather nice, but nowhere near our earlier pace. I guess that is a sign of settling down and wanting to have some downtime in addition to the fun time.
First of all, I needed to catch up on sleep a bit. The daily early-riser routine is not exactly my cup of tea, but, hey, not much that I can do there. Well, ok, I probably could go to bed a bit earlier every day, but that would be cutting out the time that Natasha and I, just the two of us, get to spend together. In all honesty, I am getting to bed now even later than in years past. One of the drawbacks of my shortened commute is less time for reading – so I compensate before going to sleep.
Anyway, less than 7 hours of nightly sleep is definitely not enough to keep myself from feeling like I need more of it, usually by, let’s see… eh… Tuesday. Add that to the fact that I am not a morning person, and the result is that at least once in a blue moon I need to catch up on sleep during the weekend and stay in bed until 9:30 (anything more, and I am risking walking around with a headache, though).
No big deal, you say, some people sleep through noon on weekends! True. But consider that my three ladies would not get out of bed before me. Consider that we, as family, now need a leisurely couple of hours from the wake-up call until we can walk out of the door (with applying make-up, doing everyone’s hair, picking outfits and what-not). And then consider that winter days are quite short. You will arrive at a greatly reduced ability to take day-trips, even with our proximity to the city. Which is a bummer.
So, on Saturday, instead of going for some expedition, Natasha picked up a couple of Becky’s school friends and, together with Becky and Kimmy, went to an IMAX theatre in Waterloo. They watched Polar Express 3D. Kimmy was bordering on ecstatic for simply being included, Becky and her friends had a good time, and Natasha was happy to do something that reminded her of her American lifestyle (I don’t mean that going to IMAX was an essential part of her lifestyle, I mean that enabling kids to have fun time was).
The master of the family was left to his own devices for the day, and he spent most of it sorting old papers.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am a bit anal about having all of the documentation in order, sorted and filed. In the beginning of every year, I go through my files and either “archive” or shred last year’s documents and statements that I do not have an immediate need for. Yes, I admit, anal. So I applied incredible executive focus and discipline and in a few hours got rid of a couple of kilo of papers and put away a bundle of about the same weight.
But upon realization of exactly how many hours I spent at this fun endeavor, I started having serious pangs of regret for wasting my weekend. So, on Sunday morning, despite not getting out of the house until almost noon, I led the family onto another museum trip.
We did not go to any place new, but returned to the Science Museum in South Kensington, which we managed to see only a third of on our first visit. It did turn out that we saw all of the most exciting parts of the museum on that first trip, but there were still a few areas of interest remaining. The kids liked the exhibition about energy (with a bunch of computerized games) and the one about materials (with tons of touch-and-see-what-happens stuff). The parents were especially fascinated with the model ship exposition, especially the extensive displays on native and historic watercraft grouped by culture and region.
Free museum entry works rather well, by the way, if you would like to take a break and go to a nice place for lunch. For some reason, for the second week in a row we ended up having Italian, but Becky devoured an entire large-size pizza (Kimmy ate three quarters of hers), so it could not have been bad.